Video Cameras, Integrating Video CCD's and Image Intensifiers do not have the high resolution of high end CCD cameras or DSLR's but you can still achieve fantastic results aligning, stacking and processing video frames.

How about we start an image gallery to show what the video camera can do!

Paul, I don't know how to start a gallery. Do you? Starting a thread is not a gallery, however, and it will be hard for people to search pictures/titles/etc. if it is in thread form. Perhaps a moderator or you may know how to start a gallery for posters. I know there are individual galleries, but I don't know how to establish a group one. Once done, then a moderator (I presume) can put a thread with a sticky that tells where it is, etc. This make sense? Roland

My term gallery was just to create a thread where Video images can be uploaded and viewed. There is nowhere to do this on CN accept upload images into the CCD Imaging & Processing thread. However because Video images do not match the quality of high end CCD's the video images can be frowned upon even though a great deal of effort goes into producing them. If there is a way to have an official Video gallery that would be great, if not at least there is a thread where we can now upload images showing what can be achieved using our video hardware.

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You might ask...they may can start a category-gallery where people can put individual galleries. On the sketching forum, if someone has a nice sketch, that becomes an individual thread, which works well. A thread with several hundred posts of a picture or sketch, however, can get really cumbersome. Roland

I'd say if Randy or the other moderators deem it to be a good topic, it would just be a sticky that we would leave to this forum. Lets face it, while you can get impressive photos with these systems, we should not compare them with actual long exposer photos. If we kept it here, we could not only share what can be done with these cameras, but share which targets we can add to the huge list of targets that can be seen with them!

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Paul, can you annotate some of your shots whether they are processed (look like they are) or if they are single frames of unprocessed video, etc? And, of course, the integration times or camera settings are helpful so people can duplicate or try the settings. Of course, if it is heavily post processed they will not be able to duplicate the view in live video at the scope. Roland

All my images have had the video exposure times specified collecting integrating frames of 2.6 seconds (max available on the GSTAR-EX). The frames have then been streamed from an MP4 recorder to a laptop using Videostudio to create a raw AVI file. I then use Videodub to strip out the audio and decimate the AVI file to the correct fps rate. I then align and stack the frames using Registax and save to bmp. I then import the bmp file into Photoshop Elements to stretch the midrange, tighten the image and clear out the noise.

Thanks, A Watec 120N. It was given to me as a gift so I kinda' feel obligated to bring back some pictures to the folks back home.Here's my M31, didn't use any filters. The images don't compare to the ones taken with my CCD, but when you consider they're only about 8-1/2 seconds exposure, pretty amazing none the less.